U2
The Joshua Tree

Release Date: 1987
Sped Date: 1988 or so
Producer: Daniel Lanois; Brian Eno

01. Where The Streets Have No Name
02. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
03. With Or Without You
04. Bullet The Blue Sky
05. Running To Stand Still

06. Red Hill Mining Town
07. In God's Country
08. Trip Through Your Wires
09. One Tree Hill
10. Exit
11. Mothers Of The Disappeared

Thoughts:

Unavailable at this time.

Other Works:

After The Joshua Tree, U2 released an album of live cuts, covers, and a few other scattered songs. Rattle and Hum will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first CD I ever owned. However it was pretty tough to listen to all the way through without a hand on the skip button.

Their next studio album, Achtung Baby is, despite the terrible title, a very good album. I picked some songs in it that I attached myself to. However, the followup to that album, Zooropa, also a hodgepodge of sorts, was pretty disappointing, with the only good to come from it a resurrection of sorts of Johnny Cash's career. Don't get me started on their latest album Pop. This is one of those albums that I'm sure they will look back on with the sentence "what the hell were we thinking?"

There are some great moments on early U2 albums. Most of the songs are a little too political for my liking, but songs like "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "New Year's Day" rank right up there with the best songs on The Joshua Tree.

In Concert: (1 time)

U2 has the honor of being the only artist that I have seen in a true stadium setting. I was privileged enough to be among the approximately 60,000 other people to see them in Soldier Field on the tour for the album Pop. It was nothing short of a debacle.

U2 is a band that has totally ruined themselves by trying to overexpose themselves to the media. I realize that with ZooTV it was supposed to be a satire of the media, but now they are just aging rock stars that are part of the whole game themselves. They do not write any important songs anymore and they are simply content to draft off their large collection of hits until they can retire in style. I wish that day would come soon. The concert I saw was absolutely terrible. I didn't care about their new songs and I felt they were ruining their old songs. It was a lose-lose situation.

I have the feeling that if the Bono of 1985 could have looked into the future and saw the Bono of 1997, he wouldn't have written the great songs he did.